Rev. Dr. Roy Talmage Brumbaugh (1890-1957) of Tacoma, Washington, was a serious player in the 1920s and 1930s in the “modernist vs. fundamentalist” national religious controversy within Protestant churches. Brumbaugh, a graduate of Gettysburg College (1912) and Princeton Theological Seminary (1919) was on the conservative, Fundamentalist side. In 1935, his mentor Rev. Dr. J. Gresham Machen, a professor of New Testament at the Seminary 1904-1929, and he created the only major schism during the 20th century within the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America.

The PC-USA, led by moderate or liberal ministers and laymen, charged conservatives Brumbaugh with insubordination and Machen with violation of his ordination which through separate, ecclesiastical trials resulted in 1935 in the suspension of both their ministries.

Brumbaugh’s flock largely supported him and went with him around the block to found the non- denominational Independent Bible Church of Tacoma the same week he left.After the PTS in 1929 was taken over by its liberal faction, Machen resigned hisprofessorship there and served as the intellectual leader of the conservative movement. He formed in 1930 Westminster Theological Seminary and in 1933 the Independent Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions, to both of which he appointed Brumbaugh as a board member. Machen died on January 1, 1937, at age 55.

Brumbaugh went on the leave his church again in 1941, served the pulpit of a BiblePresbyterian Church until 1945, and then returned that year to his renamed Independent Bible Presbyterian Church of Tacoma. In 1950, the International Council of Christian Churches selected him to go on a round-the-world trip to visit missionaries, like-minded preachers and see the world, ending his trip at the Second Plenary Conference of the ICCC in Geneva, Switzerland, where he lay a wreath at the feet of a statue of John Calvin. He kept a diary of that significant trip which the author has transcribed, edited and annotated that.

Brumbaugh died January 3, 1957, as one of the largely acknowledged leaders of the Fundamentalist faction which, which, though it has remained small, has also remained active and vibrant.